Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Why don't they make investment into areas that would result in well-being and abundances?

Paupers pay less, but still pay; the risk with well-being and abundance...where's the need to want something bad enough if you have the lot of the rest? Maybe... God forbids... one reaches the conclusion they can do without?

(although... looking at Apple fans, I would say there are slim chances for this to happen)

GSR is apparently different than bombs resisude wise. I did a shooting course once so intense I was sneezing GSR from my boogers for weeks. (shot 10,000 rounds in a week, various guns), immediately after I went home via airplane, and the dogs walked right past me.

How many people will set this off because they inadvertently picked up trace elements of an explosive vapor - will car exhaust fumes set this off? In what context do we really care about the existence of parts per billion amounts of explosive vapors? This might be an impressive technical achievement, but the commercial uses of this seem like a solution in search of a problem.

The context is... IED detection. Sweeping a road for IEDs could be more successful and that would be a good thing if AQ can pull itself back together after we leave Afghanistan and the middle east. They will be sending people here to put IED's on the road that you take to work. Not hard, just park a car full of explosives with a detector that will set it off when there are 3 or more cars within 50 feet. That'd be you, in traffic. But if the cops have such a detector, they can shut down the road, and c

That doesn't fit with the description at all. The device that was developed sounds like something that is fixed in place - not something that will lugged around with the military. Even if it could, a car filled with explosives is not exactly something we need to analyze at a parts-per-billion level. This device is used to detect something trying to be hidden, but the false positive rate sounds like it is going to be way too high to be of any use.

Do you really believe this will be used against explosives? This is a wet dream for the DEA. Buy a bunch and callibrate each to a specific illegal drug. Install in a truck, visit all the music festivals, and the economic crisis is over.

They'll just seize every car that tests positive to drug residue under civil forfeiture and sell the cars. Easy money.

I was going to make a snarky remark about how you seem to be under the impression that hippies actually own cars with more than scrap value, which leads me to assume you don't know any actual hippies.

Then I got to thinking about the types of people I remember seeing at the music festivals I used to go to - in addition to the hippies, you also get a large number of lawyers' kids and trust-fund babies (i.e., the 'idle rich), who have nothing better to do than spend mommy and daddy's money on dope.

As with anything like this, the more sensitive you make it, the more you might have to deal with false positives.

I can only imagine someone going around bumping into people at the airport making sure they all smell like something which will trigger something like this.

It wouldn't be anything more disruptive than suddenly loads of people in the airport get checked for bombs, but I bet you could terribly mess up an airport if you suddenly had a handful of people testing positive.

Of course, to be going around doing this you'd need to smell of bomb residue and probably be seen on surveillance cameras doing it. But for all I know some common household chemicals could cause this now.

Of course, to be going around doing this you'd need to smell of bomb residue and probably be seen on surveillance cameras doing it.

That doesn't matter. What matters is that you can deposit a chemical on a large number of others who have a high probability of going quickly to an airport security check. You never need to go near the sensors yourself.

One easy exploit is to rig a aerosol dispersal into a car's exhaust, then drive through a departures drop-off area a few times. Alternatively, contaminate the air around a rental car return. If the airport is one of those with significant public areas outside the secure area, a purse with an occasionally-puffing atomizer will be practically unnoticeable. Better yet, disguise the purse-riding atomizer as a wallet, and confess to coming to the airport in the middle of a pickpocketing spree. Bonus points if the pickpocketing is also staged for the benefit of cameras.

Taking another easy route, we could assume that contact's necessary to spread the scent to a person. That's also easy enough to accomplish. How many countertops, queue barrier posts, and restroom faucets are in an airport? With a small team of pre-contaminated guests with many complaints and small bladders, a barely-noticeable compound can be spread to hundreds of unsuspecting participants easily.

You could do that now. Order some uranium off of ebay, smack it with a hammer to turn it into dusts, sprinkle on the mat at the departures section so every tracks it all over the airport and watch the Chaos. Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't already happened.

It hasn't happened because it doesn't need to yet. I hate being one of those guys who says the terrorists have already won, but the terrorists have already won. An aspect of American daily life is interrupted by a constant reminder of how we pissed off somebody else. Once the privacy advocates fight enough, and enough time has passed to calm the politicians, the ridiculous security theater will relax... then there will be another incident to remind us that we will never be safe, and never really were.

The only way to return to normal convenient-yet-insecure life is to let attacks happen with no reaction, but that goes against human instinct.

Do that, causing a backup in the security line... then send a suicide bomber with a wheelie-suitcase full of explosives, shrapnel, and warfarin powder into the line. Cue giant bloody mess with many, many dead people.

It's fairly well accepted that Israeli mice are merely the protrusion into our dimension of hyper-intelligent pan-dimension beings who, unbeknownst to the human race, are the most intelligent species on the planet Earth. They spent a lot of their time in laboratories running complex experiments on man, apparently with jet engines.

Any number of google-available headlines read "dogs fail bomb-sniffing test." There are plenty of studies which show that bomb, and drug, sniffing dogs "detect" objects their handlers want them to detect.